Archive for July, 2010

On almost every sin­gle episode of Blue’s Clues the human char­ac­ter (either Joe or Steve, or in the UK, Kevin) and the dog Blue “ski­doo” some­where, which is an amaz­ingly sim­ple form of tele­port­ing (trans­port­ing one­self from one place to another instantly), whether onto the sur­face of a globe or into the image on a pic­ture or a com­puter game or into a dio­rama, but it always involves our human pro­tag­o­nist and Blue being trans­ported to some­where else that moments ago they weren’t. It seems that other char­ac­ters on the show can also ski­doo, like Mr. Salt when he needs to go to the gro­cery store.

And ski­doo­ing is an impor­tant plot point to the show, because while on their ski­doo adven­tures the char­ac­ters have learn things and get to play and also may find a Blue’s Clue, whichis  great and all, but you wanna know who else could really use ski­doo­ing, espe­cially in these try­ing eco­nomic times?

The mil­i­tary. Could totally help them out.

One top of all of the bud­get cut­ting that could be done, get­ting rid of trans­port planes/ships that are no longer required, there’s the instan­ta­neous ben­e­fits of such a power. Does the pres­i­dent need to insert a highly skilled team of Navy SEALs into Tehran RIGHT NOW to take out Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad before he does some­thing else crazy? Done! Does South Korea want to finally fin­ish the Korean War once and for all and ski­doo into Pyongyang and take on the entire pop­u­lace of North Korea before they can com­pletely mobi­lize? It’s doable. Any­thing could be doable, as long as we have a pic­ture of where we need to put our mil­i­tary and our boys could remem­ber those easy to recite words — “Blue ski­doo, we can to.” Maybe end it with a “Sir, yes sir,” too.

If Robert Oppen­heimer had been work­ing on a secret ski­doo project instead of the Man­hat­tan Project our boys could have ended WWII early and got­ten to Berlin even before the Russ­ian army was think­ing about mov­ing west­ward from Stal­in­grad and we never would have had to invade North Africa or Italy or oblit­er­ate the Atlantic Wall. And LBJ could have won the Viet­nam War, prob­a­bly, if we’d been able to ski­doo into Hanoi and con­vince Ho Chi Minh that we really did want him to be in favor of democ­racy. He might even have decided to run for reelec­tion and change the course of history.

The major draw­back is that our peo­ple need a pic­ture on the other end of the ski­doo to return the same way. If they lose that picture…well, Mr. Sec­re­tary of Defense, order a new trans­port, since we got rid of them after the bud­get cuts allowed through ski­doo­ing. Enjoy hitch­hik­ing home, soldiers!

But we could get rid of Air Force One, also, just keep that lit­tle blue dog with the Pres­i­dent when­ever he goes on the road.

I think Blue would have to remain non-partisan though. Can’t be favor­ing one polit­i­cal party over another. He’d also have to have a code name.

Any­way, just an idea. A com­pletely cool idea, but just an idea.

My old­est son loves the Curi­ous George show on PBS. He laughs along with it and after­wards will tell me the intri­cate plot points that moved the show from point A to Z. He has his favorites and his not-so-favorites, but gen­er­ally he enjoys all of them, some­what, even if he doesn’t love all of them.

I think Noah likes the show because it reminds him of him­self. George is curi­ous, fairly bright, and always get­ting into sit­u­a­tions that he’d be bet­ter off not get­ting into. He’s smart and funny and cute, just like George, and he prob­a­bly smells bet­ter than George, even though TMWTYH bathes George regularly.

But the show does one thing that, the first time I heard it, I knew imme­di­ately what it meant when I heard it.

In between the two CG seg­ments of the show they will cut to kids tak­ing some les­son that George learned and put it to prac­ti­cal real-world use. Kids will make tele­scopes out of paper towel tubes or trace their shad­ows and watch the sun move and stuff like that, but they always say the same thing after each car­toon seg­ment: “George is a mon­key, and he can do things that you can’t do.”

Really? It’s really come to that? Telling kids that a mon­key might be able to climb up tele­phone poles and swing from power lines with­out being fried to a crisp? Or that he can knock down an entire dinosaur exhibit and put it back together before some sci­en­tists return? What is the mean­ing of this?

If you’re like me you already know what this is — the legal dis­claimer. Yes, George is a mon­key, and he can do things that you can’t do, like get kid­napped from his home­land in Africa and be brought to New York City (wait — some peo­ple a long time ago did do that), or go up in a rocket and repair a satel­lite (that’s been done too), or go ski­ing and res­cue a pig (I’m sure some­one has done those exact same things on a ski trip before).

Get real, PBS. Kids are just as smart and brave and crafty and mis­chie­vous as Curi­ous George, and while the dis­claimer could read “George is a mon­key, and he can do things that you shouldn’t do with­out ask­ing your par­ents first,” all of the things he does are in fact doable, but some lit­tle kid might get hurt or die doing what George does on your show.

When I was a kid there was a park near my house and it had great things to play with there. My favorite thing to do there was swing as high as I could on the swings and then jump off the swing at its high­est point, fly­ing prob­a­bly ten feet or so from a height of about nine to ten feet in the air. It was pretty thrilling to do, and I never broke my arm or ankle, and I could have, but it was fun. And Curi­ous George has fun too, but PBS, don’t tell kids they shouldn’t be adven­tur­ous. That some­times takes all the fun out of being a kid, and if that’s the case you might as well just call him Dullard George.